pictures agency, Matrix, has walked out to join a rival and taken two
senior staff with him.
Matrix was set up six years ago by paparazzi Trevor Adams, Max
Cisotti, Jonathan Bushell and Marco Deidda, and has grown into an
operation that represents photographers all over the world. It has an
archive of 350,000 images and sends out 500 images a day.
Adams
said Cisotti had backed a bid from a company called Picture Perfect
Group to buy Matrix with an offer of £100,000 to each director. He said
the plan was to merge Matrix with established celebrity pictures agency
Retna.
But after the bid was refused, Picture Perfect has instead
bought Retna and taken on Cisotti along with Matrix picture editor
Steve Hodgson and the agency’s intellectual rights manager Adrian
Turner.
Adams said: “It was very unexpected.
Max asked to
see me in the meeting room last Wednesday and handed me a piece of
paper with two lines on it. It said: ‘I Max Cisotti resign from Matrix’
– he walked out and I have not seen him since.”
He
added: “We are very much up and running and will continue to be so, we
are moving offices next week on a new five-year-lease and are going
forward very strongly. Now we have three directors who all want to move
in the same direction.
“I have spoken to as many of our
photographers as possible and they have said they are all 100 per cent
behind staying at Matrix.”
Cisotti said: “I was approached by Picture Perfect Group to come in and restructure the business in all aspects.”
He
said he has a brief to expand Retna’s use of paparazzi-style celebrity
images – it currently specialises in more studio-based photos.
He said the split was not acrimonious and that he wishes his former colleagues good luck for the future.
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